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Lenovo Thinkcentre/ThinkStation Tiny (Project TinyMiniMicro) Reference Thread

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Occamsrazor

Member
Feb 23, 2018
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Yes, that would work very well. It's what I did using that exact model for several years until moving to VSphere.
I did also add more RAM and drive space as my needs grew, but your 16GB and 256GB should be fine to start. I don't know the US market, but that would be an extremely good price for that configuration if it was here in the UK.
Sorry for the delayed response and thanks a lot for your reply. Unfortunately it turns out the seller doesn't have these any more, so I will have to go back to the drawing board....
 
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rafale77

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Sep 28, 2020
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@Parallax, some more info you can decide whether you want to put in the the first post:
I was able to install a core i9 10850K in my P340. It appears that 125W TDP CPUs do work in this little machine. Since the i9 10900 and 10850K are essentially identical processors with different power profiles, and that the motherboard overrides these power profiles anyway, I decided to try it out and the performance is essentially identical between the two CPUs if one doesn't tweak anything. The "K" CPUs lose a few functionalities (i.e vPro) but gain the ability to be undervolted. I have been fiddling with the BIOS to enable hidden functionalities.
 
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Parallax

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Nov 8, 2020
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@rafale77 Interesting, thanks for that report. What's the heat like, does the fan get more use? What sort of power supply are you using?

I'll think about how to add this information to the post.
 

rafale77

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Sep 28, 2020
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@rafale77 Interesting, thanks for that report. What's the heat like, does the fan get more use? What sort of power supply are you using?

I'll think about how to add this information to the post.
The P340/P350/M90Qs come in 3 Power supply flavors. 135W, 170W and 230W. It seems like the M90Q ships mostly without a GPU and therefore generally gets a 135W one while the P340/P350 offers the 230W as an option but at one point was the only choice due to shortages of the 170W version.

The temperatures? Between the 65W and 125W TDP CPUs are identical. Huh? That's because these CPUs as you can see here, are setup with a PL1 (long term power limit) to match their TDP while their PL2 (Short term power limit) far exceeds that TDP... and is too much heat for these tiny/mini/micro to handle. As a result the manufacturers are locking the power limits on these units. I have been experimenting avidly to both undervolt and then increase the power limit. The side effect of this is that the 125W TDP 10850K on these machines is limited to 65W TDP and surprisingly delivers the same performance as the 65W TDP 10900 with roughly the same thermal profile. The reason to go for the 10850K is, at least at the time of writing, it is much easier to find and generally cheaper. Because it is an enthusiast CPU, there is also a lot more documentation about it. In my case, I was just trying to undervolt the CPU and the 10900 strangely got a lower power limit when I unlocked its voltage. It was purely out of curiosity and wanting to try different things that I dropped in the 10850K in it.

I accessed the power limit settings in the BIOS and they change depending on the power brick plugged to the computer.
With the 230W power supply, PL1 and PL2 are showing to be 150W. I would speculate that with the 170W one it would be 100W, and with the 135W, it would be ~85W. In reality though both the 10900 and 10850K are not respecting these settings and are running PL1=65W and PL2=120W and I have not figured out yet how to overcome this. You can see from the link above that the 10900 PL2 default value is 224W and the 10850K should be 250W which I won't try to get close to.
 
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Phenic

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Mar 17, 2015
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Lenovo M70q Gen 3 with 12th Gen Intels available on the Lenovo site. Hopefully this would drive the M920q prices down.
 
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Parallax

Active Member
Nov 8, 2020
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@rafale77 How do you get to the power settings in the BIOS?

In the opposite direction, I've been setting up my P350s and they complain loudly if you have them on a 65W power supply (which is what I have at my workbench) instead of the 170W they came with.

Also it seems the previous P350 BIOS was missing some options until recently, it looks like IOMMU on/off is new for example. Reading the forum it seems it was not present and turned off before.
 

Parallax

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Nov 8, 2020
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Lenovo M70q Gen 3 with 12th Gen Intels available on the Lenovo site. Hopefully this would drive the M920q prices down.
It certainly seems to be driving other prices down - hence my amazing find of brand new P350s with 3 year warranty recently at ~65% off retail.

Also, the P3x0 Tinys on eBay are rarer but generally significantly cheaper than their ThinkCentre equivalents (Mx0q), in the UK at least. Is it the STH effect? :p
 

rafale77

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Sep 28, 2020
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@rafale77 How do you get to the power settings in the BIOS?
It's pretty involved... The simplest way with windows is to use a tool like throttlestop but I did it the complicated way by editing the UEFI settings using RU.efi on the same USB stick with grub shell I used to upgrade the BIOS. I have been able to undervolt but the Power Limit appear to get overridden at each boot (now that I think about it, it makes sense since the BIOS detects what power brick it is fed by and adjusts accordingly at each boot) Undervolting requires turning off the OC Lock bit and then add a voltage offset.


In the opposite direction, I've been setting up my P350s and they complain loudly if you have them on a 65W power supply (which is what I have at my workbench) instead of the 170W they came with.
And rightfully so... I am pretty sure it is starving for electrons. I too just received a M90Q Gen2 but am working on the P340 for now.

Also it seems the previous P350 BIOS was missing some options until recently, it looks like IOMMU on/off is new for example. Reading the forum it seems it was not present and turned off before.
Really? My P340 had this option.
 

drvcrash

New Member
Jul 29, 2020
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I got it booting esxi on a satadom with that adapter and the dual 10g card in it. now i just need a back plate to hold the card.


p904.jpg


I just picked up a couple m90q's and was thinking of using the built in sata cable with this adapter and a satadom for boot


that way i can use the two nvme's for my vsan and the pcie slot for a AOC-STGN-I2S card

there should be enough space to stuff it all in there
 
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Wasmachineman_NL

Wittgenstein the Supercomputer FTW!
Aug 7, 2019
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@adman_c 82599 has no thermistor, according to its datasheet. But it's a 10g card, shouldn't be as bad as dual 40gbe eh. It's old, that's true. The newer the MCUs the faster yet cooler they are per same performance.
@Wasmachineman_NL keep us updated, never did that before. Only ever dealt with ebay, and in most cases sellers were willing to refund me through just messaging.
Seller has received his CPU back but I haven't heard back from either him or PayPal yet. Wonder how that will end?
 

tinfoil3d

QSFP28
May 11, 2020
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I remember I bought some RAM worth of just under 3k for the first time. While I did some cross-checking for their business it wasn't too clear. I gave guy a call, had small talk. Everything went fine, got my package very quickly. He even offered me a whole box(25x128G-3200) for I think, 14k or so? Like, "come on, you can sell that. We here don't have time for this kind of small deals."
As a matter of fact neither did I. Seeing people with questionable attitude on such a tiny amounts is mind-boggling.
 

rafale77

Member
Sep 28, 2020
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The benchmark (Cinebench R23) graph below can sum up why I love my P340 tiny as much as I do...

You can see that the micro/mini/tiny form factor limits thermal dissipation and therefore has pushed manufacturers to decrease power limits.
As I found out with my HP Elitedesk 800 G5, the i9 9900 couldn't even match the performance of a i9 9900T with a 35W TDP. This is because it is equipped with a 90W power supply and has therefore a short term Power limit of ~65W matching its long term power limit and far short of its 200W stock setting while an unlimited 9900t bumps to 122W. The drop in multicore performance is huge (26%) and makes the CPU selection very questionable on the HP mini.
The Lenovo on the other hand has much less of a problem handling the i9 10900 showing only a 9% drop due to it's PL2 being set at 120W instead of 223W the CPU would normally ask for (it actually really is performing like the 35W TDP 10900T which would have similar power limitations). As I said in a previous post I ended up switching to a 10850K which allowed to undervolt and as a result performs at even a TDP of 65W and PL2 of 120W still outperforms an unlimited 10900 at 65W/223W. For reference on the right side, shaded blue are the Apple offering to see how this compares to the 2 latest generations of similarly sized MacMini.

1653094563313.png
 

Parallax

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Nov 8, 2020
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London, UK
Seller has received his CPU back but I haven't heard back from either him or PayPal yet. Wonder how that will end?
Not electronics related but my wife bought a ~£5,000 antique teaset from Thailand and paid through PayPal. When it arrived it was not as described (damage not disclosed) so she complained to the seller, and received not much response. So she raised a dispute with PayPal and, though she did have to wait a few weeks, PayPal paid her back the whole amount with no argument and she didn't have to return the teaset either - the seller never got back in touch with her. I think that's pretty impressive - I doubt PayPal got their money back from the seller and it's not a small amount - so don't give up!
 

Parallax

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Nov 8, 2020
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London, UK
Oh yeah, I remember that now, sorry!

Someone needs to send him an M90q :p
This unfortunate limitation was noted in the original post in the "baffle/rear bracket" section, last bullet. ;)

In fact potentially all s/he needs is probably a new design baffle to take the measurements from? I would help out, but I don't have a spare and shipping to the US at the moment from the UK is really expensive for some reason.
 

Parallax

Active Member
Nov 8, 2020
417
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London, UK
What was already a superb deal has got even better, brand new P350 Tiny (ie M90q Gen 2) with a full fat 11500 and 170W power supply, £460 delivered in the UK, with possible discounts if you buy several.


It seems rude not to buy more at this price, but is it really worth replacing a pair of M70q Gen 1s which I got for a crazy low price just to get the PCIe slot, extra m.2, and a bit more power consumption (presumably)? :confused:
 
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